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A Year of Cool Comic Book Moments – Day 180

Here is the latest cool comic book moment in our year-long look at one cool comic book moment a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here‘s the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today, somewhat by request, we have another neat Mark Waid Justice League International Quarterly story (Waid has a really good one in his first issue, #4, but I’m a bit unsure how to find a “moment” in it – the “moments” in the issue are a bit too spread out – but maybe I’ll figure that one out in the future)…

Enjoy!

Justice League International Quarterly #9 had a lead story written by Waid and drawn by Rod Whigham. The gist of the plot is that six members of the Justice League go to bring in a mad scientist named Ira Quimby. Once there, they discover he’s been messing around with mind-control drugs, more specifically he’s developed a drug where the odds are that 1 in 6 people exposed to the gas will become a homicidal maniac in one hour. He demonstrates this by showing them a loving monkey family where, upon one hour being completed, the father beats the rest of his family to death.

Well, naturally, the Justice Leaguers (Blue Beetle, Guy Gardner, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice and Flash – who were basically Waid’s team during these stories) are exposed to the gas. Naturally, they can’t leave as they are contaminated, so they have to wait the hour out.

We get a lot of paranoia, and then Quimby shows that he has a personal force field – his plan is to watch them kill each other for his amusement! Then it broke down, but that gave Blue Beetle an idea!

However, then this happened…

A chase scene ensues…

And finally, we come to the end of the chase scene…

And the fun conclusion of the story…

As to “the” moment, I’m torn – it’s either when Beetle “reveals” himself to be the crazy one or when he reveals his actual plan.